Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  Alan was a believer in himself and in doing the impossible. There was only one way to win back his wings, and that was to accomplish what the NASA doctors said could not be done: cure the Ménierè’s syndrome that shackled him to his desk.

  The long road back began with an exchange with fellow astronaut Tom Stafford. “Al, maybe I’ve got something for you.”

  Shepard listened. Tom Stafford wasn’t one for idle conversation.

  “The guys were talking about some doctor in Los Angeles who’s pulling off cures for problems other MDs say can’t be cured. They say he’s a specialist in ear, nose, and throat. Nothing unusual about that, but the word is that he’s developed a surgical procedure that can get rid of this Ménière’s problem you’ve got.”

  “Surgical?” Alan asked carefully.

  “Uh-huh. You’re being treated by medication, right?”

  Shepard nodded.

  “Doing any good?”

  “Sure. I’m just about deaf now in my left ear. You said he uses surgery?”

  “That’s what I’m told. More than that, whatever he does works. Why don’t you go see the man? You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “You’re right,” Alan replied. But he had a different outlook toward the possibility of release from debilitating affliction. He didn’t judge the matter as nothing to lose. To Alan Shepard it was a case of his having everything to gain.

  “Hell, yes,” he said abruptly to Stafford. “I’ll go anywhere, try anything.”

  He met with Dr. William House in Los Angeles. House examined Shepard, and they met for a straight talk.

  “In my judgment, Mr. Shepard, you’re what we call a classic Ménière’s case.”

  “Thanks,” Alan said dryly. He knew that already. Classic or common, it didn’t matter. What counted was getting back into flight. “Can you help me?” he asked.

  “I believe I can.”

  “Don’t stop now, Doctor.”

  “Here’s what I recommend. First, I’d go after the fluid that’s building up such pressure in your inner ear. That’s more than enough to ground any pilot. Turn the world upside down.”

  “Yes,” Alan said noncommittally.

  “I’d surgically cut a hole in the sac containing that fluid, after which I would insert a short tube between the fluid sac and a gland that leads into the spinal column. That will drain off some of the fluid, just for starters, so instead of the intense pressure within your ear, concentrated in a very small area, that pressure would dissipate over a much wider area. That, and your body doing its best to return to normal, just might do it.”

  Shepard didn’t waste a moment. “Sounds like a hell of an idea to me. Let’s go for it.”

  He returned to Houston to discuss the matter with Louise. His wife had watched him through five years of frustration and periods of bitterness. “But there’s no guarantee in all this,” he told her. “House will do everything he can, and I think he’s great, but he can’t promise he’ll be successful. I’m burning up inside, Louise. I want so badly to fly again in space.” He balled his hands into knotted fists of repressed emotions. “I’m willing to try anything.”

  “I know,” she said quietly, fully aware that surgery involving the inner ear was delicate and dangerous at best, at worst bad enough to cripple for life the man she loved.

  “Do it,” she urged. “Go for it,” she added in the same words he’d spoken to Dr. House.

  He nodded. “All right.” Relief flooded through him. “But we can’t tell anyone,” he cautioned his wife. “I want this done in absolute secrecy.”

  Alan Shepard swore Dr. House to absolute confidence. This doctor turned out to be as great a man as he was a surgeon.

  “What name do we use for you?” was his response.

  “Give me any name. Just so long as it’s not mine.”

  House called his office nurse, one person who was in on the secret. She was of Greek extraction, and House kept that in mind. “Give me a name,” he directed.

  She pulled a name out of thin air. Medically, Alan Shepard wasn’t in Dr. House’s care. Victor Poulos was the name he used to check into the hospital. He remained there for two days for surgery and the follow-up examination.

  Louise’s eyes widened when she saw her man with a large bandage covering the left side of his head. Beneath that bandage a tube, thinner than pencil lead, had been inserted between his inner ear and his spinal column. He explained the operation to Louise.

  “How soon will you know?” she asked.

  “It could take months,” he told her.

  “It’s already taken five years,” Louise reminded him.

  Back at work, Shepard might have well as tried to conceal a bright strobe light on the side of his face as to ignore the heavy bandage. No secrets there. So he asked first Deke Slayton and then the NASA flight surgeons to keep the true need for the bandage a confidential matter among themselves. They agreed, and then worked with Dr. House to monitor his progress as the months rolled by with agonizing slowness.

  He improved steadily. He had waited five years for this surgery, and he waited another eight months while his hearing returned and he gradually regained his balance. At the end of that period he met privately with Dr. House.

  “My friend, you’re cured.”

  That wasn’t quite enough. But when the NASA flight surgeons ran Alan through tests bordering on the edge of brutal, they grinned at Shepard. “Dr. House is correct. You are cured. It’s amazing. Full recovery.”

  Alan was elated, but still it was not enough. “Which means?” he asked.

  They knew his hesitation. “It means,” they told him, “you are fully qualified for space flight.”

  The spring in Alan’s step wasn’t just elastic. He almost went ballistic with untrammeled joy.

  Suddenly the moon began coming closer. Alan went after the prize assignment like a hungry wolverine. He burst into Slayton’s office.

  “Deke, dammit!” he burst out, no pretense at protocol. “We’ve got to get me a flight to the moon!”

  Deke was more than pleased for his old friend. They’d fought the same kind of battle for years, wore the same chains to a desk. He’d do anything to get Alan back “upstairs.” It would mean one of the Mercury Seven would reach the moon, and as Deke sat back to consider the possibilities, his eyes widened. A flight for Alan could mean a slight crack in that closed door for Slayton. There just might be an unexpected silver lining in the cloud that had hung for so many years over both men. If a forty-five-year-old pilot like Shepard could rebound from a medical grounding, then there was still hope for him. Like Alan’s, until recently Deke’s periodic medical exams had continued to paint a black wall for his future as an astronaut.

  But what the hell. A whole passel of flight surgeons had time and again told Shepard he’d never be at the controls again of anything that left the ground. And that included balloons and kites!

  “I’ll get right on it,” Deke said, breaking away from his thoughts.

  Shepard was tearing apart the chains from his desk. “Hell, Deke, don’t give me that getting on something. Let’s do it.”

  Deke smiled. Alan was a thoroughbred trembling for the break at the gate. “Well, Pete Conrad’s crew is training for Apollo 12,” Deke said. “I’m just about to name Jim Lovell’s crew to 13.”

  Alan knifed into the choices. “Okay, let’s move Lovell back one mission and give me the shot at thirteen.”

  “Easier said than done,” Deke grunted. “I can’t see Jim backing up for anybody. And under normal rotation, he knows he’s in line.”

  Alan grinned like a bulldog and sank his teeth in deeper. “You tell Jim yet he’s got thirteen?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So make it official that I’m taking Thirteen,” Alan pressed, “and at the same time you can assign Lovell to Fourteen!”

  Deke said he would give it his best shot. “But until the smoke clears,” he warned, “this is not official. It’s too quick for that. You
can start thinking about a crew, make some plans, but I’m not promising anything.”

  Alan grinned and went to work, planning a Mercury Seven trip to the moon. “Who’s the smartest astronaut in the corps?” he asked. “Edgar Mitchell,” came the reply many times over and Shepard selected him—an MIT Ph.D. with five additional doctorates on his wall. He added another overqualified rookie, Stuart Roosa. They both were outstanding pilots and astronauts. Sharp, capable, highly intelligent. Roosa would be his command module pilot. Mitchell would walk the lunar landscape with him.

  But before any crew selections were announced, the names-and-missions selections were kicked upstairs to NASA headquarters for final approval. Deke had never experienced a rejection of his crew selections, but there’s always the first time.

  The choice of Shepard and two space neophytes for Apollo 13 raised headquarters’ eyebrows to new heights. Their caution seemed justified. NASA’s top people questioned the wisdom of sending three men to the moon without full training with a total space flight experience of sixteen minutes. They judged the selection, at that time, as an unjustified risk. Yet they also judged Shepard unexcelled in his ability, and they concurred in his selection of Roosa and Mitchell.

  They stayed with caution without rejection. They told Deke to give the Shepard crew more time to train, to work the simulators, to be hair-trigger ready.

  The word went back to Houston. Jim Lovell would command Apollo 13.

  Alan Shepard would command Apollo 14.

  Shepard grinned. He would be going for his beloved Mercury Seven. Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordo, and Deke had their flight!

  His faith, his dedication, his skills—unflagging for more than five years, they were making the comeback pay off in spades.

  Fate had also stepped in, but no one yet could know the future. Being bumped back one flight to Apollo 14 was a godsend.

  Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Dick Gordon set sail on November 14, 1969, for the moon’s Ocean of Storms. The Saturn V rose into what had been heavy rain but without lightning. But NASA quickly learned that a thirty-six-story rocket under full bore, climbing in rain, becomes a lightning generator from the escape rocket on top to the last jagged streamers of fire from its engines more than eight hundred feet long. Static electricity built up by its passage through the rain can suddenly discharge.

  Soggy observers could not see the rising Saturn V through the clouds. But suddenly the assembled thousands were surprised and alarmed when lightning flashed from the overcast into the launch complex area. Reporters at the Press Site yelled, “What happened?”

  The three Navy commanders inside the command module they had named Yankee Clipper saw brilliant flashes and heard strange roaring noises that space veterans Conrad and Gordon had never before known. Lightning cracked against their spacecraft and tripped the main circuit breakers. Inside the ship, darkness fell only to quickly return with flashing red warning lights.

  Backup batteries in Apollo 12 came on line to reinstate energy needs. Pete’s first words seemed to drop the temperature in Mission Control by twenty degrees.

  “I think we got hit by lightning,” he said with astonishing calm. “We just lost the guidance platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here.” Even as he spoke, Yankee Clipper automatically brought itself back to light and power. The huge Saturn V, with a separate, independent guidance system not affected by the jolt, continued to accelerate the Apollo 12 assembly to earth orbit.

  Conrad scanned his gauges. “We just had everything in the world drop out,” he called to CapCom. Dick Gordon quickly punched some circuit breakers to shift from the backup to the primary electrical system. Everything came back on line.

  Mission Control came back with relief. “We’ve had a couple of cardiac arrests down here.”

  The Saturn V’s third stage pushed Apollo 12 into orbit about the earth and shut down on schedule. For the moment the astronauts were safe enough to take deep breaths and get their ship back in prime condition. Few among the ground teams believed the spaceship would even fire up for the moon. Every guidance, navigation, and computer control system had to be completely reset with updated programs and validated by computers aboard the ship and in Mission Control. Most engineers figured the odds as only one in a hundred for a moon landing.

  The coordination between orbit and ground pulled off the near impossible. All systems checked out, the third stage flamed, and Apollo 12 was moonbound.

  Conrad planned to land within six hundred feet of an unmanned Surveyor robot ship, which had touched down to scout the Ocean of Storms landing site thirty-one months before. The descent from moon orbit in the lunar module Conrad and Bean had named Intrepid was a flight of “incredible accuracy and control.” Pete told CapCom the Surveyor seemed to be waiting for them. He danced Intrepid about to select the best touchdown area and dropped gently to the surface.

  “Outstanding!” Pete shouted into his mike. “I can’t wait to get outside! Those rocks have been waiting four and a half billion years for us to come out and grab them. Holy cow, it’s beautiful out there.”

  Pete was the shortest of the astronauts, just five feet six inches tall. He also was one of the funniest. He climbed backward from Intrepid’s hatch, worked his way down the ladder, pushed away for the drop to the ground, and sang out for all the world to hear: “That may have been one small step for Neil, but it was a long one for me.”

  The irrepressible Conrad and his teammate, Alan Bean, performed two four-hour excursions from their lunar lander, deploying scientific instruments and collecting seventy-five pounds of rocks and surface material. They jogged down the slope of a wide crater to Surveyor, then chopped and hacked fifteen pounds of material from the robot to take home for study. They also plowed their way through a surface markedly different from what Apollo 11 had faced.

  “The dust!” Pete exclaimed. “Dust got into everything. You walked and a pair of little dust clouds kicked up around your feet.” Dust clung to their boots and spacesuit legs so thick that during their rest and sleep periods they remained in their suits to keep vital parts from becoming clogged.

  Back outside, they found unexpected sights exciting the scientists listening to every word. Conrad reported “a group of conical mounds, looking like . . . small volcanoes.” They found green rocks and tan dust. The dust even covered the Surveyor, which proved Intrepid’s landing engine had blasted away a dust storm more than a thousand feet from the ship.

  Soon, much too soon for Conrad and Bean, Intrepid left the Ocean of Storms and made a picture-perfect flight to rendezvous with Dick Gordon and Yankee Clipper for the return trip. They went home in a flight of continued dazzling precision.

  John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth before the decade was out had been achieved, twice.

  The months rolled by with interminable slowness as Deke remained shackled to his desk while he sent his friends on history-making adventures to the moon. No one could miss the frustrated mood that sometimes hung over him like a dark cloud. Nor could they fault him.

  He had felt a sense of victory in getting his close friend, Alan Shepard, command of a lunar mission. But that was an aside to the stonewalled urge to get his self “out there.”

  His skipping heart hung about his neck like a great dead albatross. He was almost convinced he’d have the most unenviable record from among the original Mercury astronauts. He’d be the only one never to fly in space.

  Deke was the most experienced test pilot in the group. Rated to fly anything with wings. Which meant he had to be ready for the totally unexpected.

  Early in 1970 it happened. The dark and dismal future cracked open.

  He was at the Cape to prepare the Apollo 13 crew for its mission. The miseries of clipped wings worsened when Deke came down with a cold. He reported to the flight surgeons for help.

  “Vitamins,” they told him, fully aware that neither they nor anyone else really knew what caused the common c
old. “Take vitamins, a hell of a lot of vitamins.”

  Deke grumbled and began cramming large doses of Vitamins B, C, and E into his body. He knew very well the old adage that if you treat a cold it goes away in seven days, and if you ignore a cold it goes away in a week. But his was a whopper, and he kept ingesting the vitamins day after day.

  Ever since he’d been bounced off the second Mercury orbital flight, he had had his heartbeat irregularity an average of once every month.

  Then he realized that had changed since he had begun taking vitamins. He rushed into the office of Dr. Charles Berry, the astronauts’ chief flight surgeon.

  “Chuck, listen to me,” he said excitedly. “I haven’t had one of those heart episodes for a hell of a long time. Something’s happening!”

  Berry studied his longtime friend. “You doing anything different?”

  “Hell, yes. I’m a vitamin junkie.”

  Chuck Berry nodded slowly. “Deke, keep taking them. Keep dancing with the one who brought you. If you continue to go along without any heart episodes, well . . . ”

  “Well, what?” Deke demanded.

  Berry looked up as if he could see beyond the sky, then back to Deke. “Maybe, my friend, just maybe . . . ”

  Maybe . . .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Apollo 13: NASA’s Finest Hour

  IT WAS TIME TO STIR the frigid broth deep inside Apollo 13. Four large circular tanks contained super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, the “soup of life” for the ship and its crew of three. Apollo 13 was a vessel of long-range exploration, and tiny fans stirred the tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen that kept its three astronauts supplied with breathing air, drinking water, and electricity for their ship. Astronaut Jack Swigert stretched slowly. It had been a good day, and he had completed most of his scheduled assignments. Swigert reached out to his control panel and flipped a switch, activating the tiny fans.